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Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Book Promotion Sites - Follow @RosaSRaskin (twitter handle)

Once a self-published, indie book is on a platform, the next step is marketing, which was discussed in earlier posts on this blog and is closely tied to distribution. There are many helpful promotion sites.

My recommendation is to get to aggregates sites, lists with addresses of FREE sites that will help promote your book and try them out. But keep track of what works for your book or you will be creating and recreating the wheel.

It is almost impossible to keep up with this if solo, yet some of us try our hand at various marketing avenues. As long as you keep track of at least what does NOT work for your book, you will avoid reinventing the wheel. In the end, "Distribution is King" as long as your book can be found easily.

If key metadata like title and conventional author are missing, it will be more difficult for others
to find the book -- even Facebook does not accept a book on my favorite's list if no author name
provided. Currently, they do not accept editors in the author field, using anything but a true author's name leads to a search error. Same goes for other metadata, try to search titles before you select one. It is probably impossible to have a unique title for long, but hopefully customers can find your book by the name of the author. If you can not use your name for some reason, try a "Pen" name, but try to avoid initials or shortcuts. If you can not fill in a name in the author field, maybe self-publishing is NOT the best route for you at this time, but do not give up as once again in the end "Distribution is King." and books are recommended by word of mouth.

If solo, without anyone helping or paying any third parties, which is the case for many of us, one may have to choose between writing content or marketing, thus aggregate sites like Crosbie's List on Indies Unlimited helps save time.